Within a vast deforested area on Borneo island, Australia and Indonesia hope to turn an ecological disaster into a global lesson on how to help local communities save tropical forests and fight climate change.
Borneo, like the Amazon, is at the center of efforts to fight deforestation that is a major contributor to global warming and many governments are trying to build on a UN-backed scheme that aims to reward developing nations for preserving their forests.
Billion of dollars in annual revenues are potentially in the offing but getting the support of local communities is crucial if forests are to remain standing and the scheme is to succeed.
PHOTO: REUTERS
“The major challenge is to change the behavior of the community. That’s the main problem,” said Ben Tular of CARE Indonesia.
The NGO is among a number of groups helping Australia and Indonesia develop the Kalimantan Forests and Climate Partnership (KFCP) which aims to preserve and rehabilitate 100,000 hectares of carbon-rich peat land in Central Kalimantan.
Half the area has been cleared and half is still forested but under threat unless alternative livelihoods are found for the 20,000 people living in and around the project area. Australia has pledged A$30 million (US$24million) to fund the project until 2012 and a full field team will be on the ground from next month.
Tular, CARE’s program manager for the project, said there had been an sharp increase in deforestation in the KFCP area because revenues from rubber, the main source of income for many villagers, had plunged because of the global financial crisis.
“Most of them have tried to developing farming there,” he said of the cleared area of 50,000 hectares.
“But maybe about 90 percent of activities have failed because the land is very acid. Most of the crops are dead.”
KFCP, though, is part of a much wider problem. It represents a fraction of an area of forest cleared in the 1990s on the orders of former Indonesian president Suharto on the mistaken hopes of growing vast crops of rice.
About a million hectares of forest were cleared, much of it sitting on carbon-rich peat swamps, and more than 4,000km of drainage canals were dug.
Observers who’ve seen the failed site from the air, say the former mega rice project area looks like a giant scar on the land, and during the dry season it is vulnerable to burning.
But where many see disaster, others see opportunity in the vast amount of carbon locked away in the peat soils.
The sale of carbon credits from stopping the peat land from burning and replanting the denuded areas could provide the incentive to slow the rate of deforestation, particularly in Borneo, which has already lost about half its forests.
Tropical rainforests and particularly peatland forests, soak up vast amounts of carbon-dioxide, locking away carbon in the wood and soil. Peat forests can release more than 2,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide per hectare when drained and burned as well as large amounts of methane, a far more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide .
AusAID, the Australian government’s aid arm, and the Department of Climate Change in Canberra are helping develop the KFCP program along with the Indonesian government and the Central Kalimantan provincial administration.
The program is one of the first large-scale demonstration projects under the UN-backed forest carbon scheme. Called reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD), the project aims to use carbon credits from saving forests to reward developing nations.
In the meantime, the Kalimantan partnership aims to tackle the very causes of deforestation.
“There’s no point going in to do rehabilitation work if you’re not looking at the broad drivers of deforestation,” said Clare Walsh of the Department of Climate Change in Canberra.
These drivers included subsistence farming, logging or other uses of the forests and it was crucial to focus on economic development opportunities to tackle them.
Alternative schemes could include fish farming, growing alternative cash crops and sustainable forestry by planting valuable timber species for harvesting. CARE has already introduced some of these into communities elsewhere in the mega-rice area.
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